Essays on Writing and Language in Honor - Sino-Platonic Papers

Sim-Platonic Papers, 27 (August 3 1,199 1)
misclassification of the Chinese script as an ideographic
script famous west ern linguists and scholars. Although
Chinese uses the sane morphemic radical concept
employed by the Sumerians in their cuneiform script which
fell into disuse more than three thousand years ago, Prof.
DeFrancis believes that the two writing systems were
invented independently. Unlike the Sumerian writing
system which influenced the developments of other scripts
the Middle the invent ion the
Semitic alphabetic system, the Chinese writing system
remained basically unchanged for more than two thousand
years. Today, Chinese remains the only completely
non-alphabetic writing system in the world.
All these academic debates seem to have a
practical bearing on the general attitude towards the
value of the Chinese writing system and the necessity and
feasibility of its alphabetization. Personal
communications between Prof. DeFrancis and myself have
made me aware of his concept that all human languages are
rooted in the ancient past, but some have evolved while
others became fossilized, and those which have
alphabetized are much more efficient. Just as Vietnamese,
Korean and Japanese have recently (in the historical time
scale) been alphabetized, Chinese need not be an
exception. Professor DeFrancis is firmly convinced that it
is possible to write Chinese alphabetically without Hmzi.
I also would like to point out the fact that, in view of
the increasing stability of the spoken languages as a
result of advances in modern audio communication and
recording technology, a newly created phonetic script will